5 Stories You May Have Missed With Meredith Trimble

Tyler Podcast Episode 41, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and content marketing director Jeff Harrell – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary

With 2021 quickly coming to an end, we wanted to surface some very important stories you may have missed. Meredith Trimble, manager of editorial content for Tyler Technologies, joins me with a carefully curated list of five powerful stories from 2021 we can all learn from. You'll love the variety and practical application these stories provide.

Transcript

Meredith Trimble: I just love the notion of taking a disruption and leveraging that opportunity to just dramatically improve things.

Jeff Harrell: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech podcast, where we talk about issues facing communities today and highlight the people, places, and technology making a difference. My name is Jeff Harrell. I'm the director of content marketing for Tyler Technologies, and I'm so glad you joined me. Well, believe it or not, we are in the middle of November, which means the end of the year is quickly approaching. It's the holiday season here in the United States, and we felt like there are some great stories that have been told throughout 2021 that we wanted to share with you. And so I have asked our manager of editorial content, Meredith Trimble to join me on today's episode. And she has carefully selected five different stories that you may have missed from 2021. It's a really fun episode. It's some great, great content, great stories. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Meredith Trimble. Well, Meredith, thanks for joining me. And I thought we could start out because I think there's a resource that we have on Tylertech.com that some people know about, but I think a lot of people don't know about and that's our resource center. So if you don't mind just walking us through what the resource center is and really what kind of content is on the resource center and how often it gets updated.

Meredith Trimble: Sure. Tyler's resource center is absolutely full of thought leadership content, white papers, videos, webinars. All of these are free. And what I think is the most interesting is in terms of storytelling, which we're talking about today, there are more than 700 blogs or stories on the resource center. And users can go and curate their own set to read by using the resource center filters and searching for stories by all sorts of things, like type of government involved. There are nine different types of pandemic related topics that people can choose from, from federal funding uses to online courts to essential data. People can filter by type of technology solution mentioned in the stories and more. And I think maybe even easier, anyone can subscribe to receive curated content in their inboxes monthly through our eNewsletter subscription. So I know we're talking about stories people may have missed this year, but maybe if people subscribe, going forward in 2020, there won't be any stories that people miss that are of interest to them.

Jeff Harrell: Yes. That is definitely the goal. And thank you for that, because I think it can be overwhelming. There's so much great content, but the filtering feature really allows you to. You can even put keywords in to get exactly what you want. But I think the filtering feature really helps you, like you said, curate the content that you like. There's a lot of evergreen content on there that will remain there for quite a while, but it also gets updated quite frequently, isn't that the case?

Meredith Trimble: There are multiple new blogs and new assets added to the resource center every single week. On any given week, I know that I personally have my hands on anywhere from one to three new stories. And our other business units are adding content weekly as well. So anytime anybody happens upon the resource center, there is bound to be fresh new content available.

Jeff Harrell: So Meredith, there's lots of content on the resource center. We wanted to highlight five things people have missed. What was some of the criteria? You went and back and selected the different stories that you wanted to highlight, what were some of the things you thought about, some of the criteria that you used?

Meredith Trimble: Well, here, I want to give you just a little bit of context because 2021 saw so many stories, actually more than 150 stories around a really unique type of government problem solving that came from pandemic related challenges, but that's going to continue to strengthen government service and improve communities for years to come. So it's really hard for me to isolate just a handful of these great stories. I did choose a few that really shouldn't be missed. And I say that because even the smallest instances of innovation are scalable and these can be tried in other jurisdictions. And those things can lead to great efficiencies or really good PR wins in terms of service. And so the great thing about these stories and the resource center and the Tyler peer community is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel when someone else has gone before. And that's really why I chose the five stories that I did.

Virtual Marriage Application

Jeff Harrell: All right. Well, let's start with story number one. What's our first story that we may have missed?

Meredith Trimble: Number one, marriage license applications go online. This is a story about the county clerk in Washtenaw County, Michigan. And there, the vital records division staff asked, "Is virtual marriage application, is that process even possible?" And I chose this because big life events like weddings were made so complicated during the pandemic. I know of multiple couples just from my own circles who planned a wedding, rescheduled the wedding, rescheduled the reschedule.

Jeff Harrell: Yeah.

Meredith Trimble: And then finally just took a trip out West with seven people or eloped in a field somewhere. And marriages just didn't stop during the pandemic, but the entire process from marriage license on just became super complicated. And that wasn't just a challenge for the couples themselves. So all these county clerks across the country faced an acute challenge in providing a means for the public to apply for a marriage license without being physically present in these offices. And even with basic self-service options for the public, there are certainly situations in which applicants could maybe go online and populate a marriage affidavit online. It's typically still necessary for at least one party to physically appear for the clerk's witness or to pay the fee or something like that. So Washtenaw County created a fully remote virtual marriage application process, which was super cool. It's kind of a self-service online wizard that they developed, and customers can complete each step of the application in order online.

Meredith Trimble: And so that kind of looks like securely uploading any documents, scheduling virtual appointments for a witness and even paying the application fee online, which as you can imagine was necessary during the pandemic. But I think it's one of those things that going forward, it's going to prove extremely convenient for everyone all around.

Jeff Harrell: I love this one Meredith because first of all, it hits close to home because I've got two kids that have gotten married. We were very fortunate. Our first kid, our oldest got married in 2019, so right before the pandemic hit. And then our second one got married this past year, so kind of after things got a little bit back to normal. So we dodged it a little bit. But my daughter's best friend was supposed to get married in 2020 and they had to postpone it. So yeah, these major life events that pre pandemic times are just all about fun and joy and excitement and... But when there's a pandemic and you've got to get a marriage license, all of a sudden man technology can help make that a little bit more fun than maybe it could have been. So I really, really like this story.

Meredith Trimble: Yep. I love it too, because also for not just the couples and families involved who are already going through so much stress and wedding planning, it relieves the staff of the county clerk's offices of so much extra work. If you can provide the affidavit electronically to applicants before their virtual appointment, it eliminates all that sort of same day manual paper shuffling and preparation and emailing and printing, adding in credit card payments, giving out receipts. All that sort of manual paper based stuff is now out of the mix. And so my bet is that county staffs enjoy it just as much as the couples.

Mississippians Skipping the Line

Jeff Harrell: Absolutely. And by the way, I will put all of the links to these stories in the show notes, but you can also go to Tylertech.com. At the top, click on resources and just search by marriage license applications go online and you'll find this story. Love this one, Meredith. All right, well, what's our second story?

Meredith Trimble: Number two is titled "In Mississippi, residents skip the line." So who out there doesn't want to skip a line? And that's why I picked this. People should not miss this blog. This story talks about the state of Mississippi's department of public safety. And just to give a little context here, government departments at all levels essentially experienced two waves of the pandemic as it affected their own operations. So first, all of these government agencies dealt with the rapid switch to digital government services that were closed during office closures. And that came with some challenges around business continuity and citizen experience. But the second wave that I don't think people talk about as much was a safe, organized reopening of offices for staff and the public, but with COVID-19 precautions still in place. So that was a whole other set of challenges. And for Mississippi's department of public safety, this meant newly servicing more than two million driving age residents in person with those COVID-19 precautions in place. And what that really meant is that what people had been kind of used to before in terms of crowded waiting rooms and long lines were no longer a possibility.

Meredith Trimble: And the solution here was an online scheduling tool, which I just found really cool. The tool allows residents to schedule in person, phone or virtual appointments online. And the system also provides the agency with a way to notify those people through automated text or email of their upcoming appointments. So it gives them automatic reminders. It can, and I love this part too, electronically collect all of the required information for whatever type of appointment it is, forms. It can even collect payments ahead of in person visits. So all of that, once the person actually gets in the door at their scheduled appointment time, saves even more time there in person, as well as just all of the hassle. And what is particularly cool about this is that it's all part of the state's larger skip the line program. And a part of that, I just love this is a chat bot called Missi. And Missi facilitates more than 30 iterations that provide residents with direct access to appointments or live camera feeds, or even the more mundane things that people need government for, like to change their address.

Meredith Trimble: And so residents can tell Missi, "I need to make an appointment" or just say, "Appointment" or "Cameras," and they'll be automatically directed to the respective skip the line service. So I just think that's really fantastic. And that chat bot, Missi, it gathers feedback from citizens. It learns from that feedback and it edits its future responses based on that feedback to be even more customer service oriented.

Jeff Harrell: Yeah. Meredith, there's a couple of things I really love about this. First of all, by naming your chat bot Missi, and giving it a little bit of a personality and a human feel, it just makes it feel more approachable. That's a best practice that I think we learned about at one of the conferences we went to is humanize that technology and humanize that process makes a big difference. So well done, Mississippi. The other thing I love, I don't know if you remember this Meredith, remember the days when you had to wait in line and buy movie tickets and then wait in line to get into the theater and jockey for position for your favorite seats?

Meredith Trimble: I do. And it was anxiety-inducing.

Jeff Harrell: Oh my gosh. Because I have very specific seats that I like to sit in at the movie, the very top, right in the middle. And now with online, buy your tickets ahead of time, reserve tickets, skip the line. Don't have to worry about the stress. Show up if you want to right before the movie starts or if you enjoy the previews like I do, get there a little bit early. This story made me think of that. I love this idea of skipping the line.

Meredith Trimble: Me too. Absolutely.

Transportation Scalable Successes 

Jeff Harrell: Okay. Well, what's story number three?

Meredith Trimble: Number three, there were so many great stories this year about innovation and education. School districts faced so many unique challenges with the pandemic. And so I love number three in particular, which is called, transportation scalable successes. Because what this school, it was township high school district 214 in Arlington Heights, Illinois. What this district did is just so genius and can apply to so many situations going forward. Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this district offered its students an amazing array of extra opportunities, opportunities to access local college classes or internships, industrial certification programs and even community service opportunities. And so those customized experiential types of offerings were all obviously outside of school buildings. So transportation officials there had to grapple with or accommodate an enormous number of possible student transportation schedules based on what they were choosing.

Meredith Trimble: So when the schools closed during the pandemic, the district seized this opportunity, which I love about this story, to harness that unexpected disruption and to use that to implement a brand new student transportation model. I just love the notion of taking a disruption and leveraging that opportunity to just dramatically improve things. And here, they needed a way to allow nearly 12,000 students to get to and from their homes and to and from over 25 different program locations for any given class period, which when you really think about that, is just mind boggling. So the story tells how the district did away with its old roots and used modern school transportation software to build a brand new model that is inspired by public transit, which in some ways is so obvious, but it's just not something that you see a lot. And so this resulted in 65 different shuttles that now run across the community and serves students traveling home or to internships or to those other educational locations. And the great thing about this too, that I think is so scalable, even on a smaller level for any other district out there, is that the new system also provides teachers with a really unique opportunity to be able to say to a student, "Hey, let's meet one on one after school for some extra support."

Meredith Trimble: And to be able to do that without worrying that the student then can't get home. Because these shuttles run late into the evening, students can do these types of things, get extra support, have one on one mentorship or coaching with an adult in the school without worrying about how to get home.

Jeff Harrell: I love this one, Meredith. It reminds me back when I was going to school all those many years ago, the bus just showed up and you just assume it just shows up. But we've done several different podcasts on school transportation and the ability to get the bus to arrive at the right time on the correct side of the road, to pick up the right students, deliver them to the right place, I mean, that is a huge task. And to be able to leverage technology for that and then, like you said, apply it now to different scenarios using transportation in different scenarios, I think it's just an awesome story. So thank you for calling that one out.

Meredith Trimble: It is, it opens up so much in terms of access to all students that may not have been able to participate in some types of things before.

A County Modernizing the Cloud

Jeff Harrell: That's great. And if you want to find that one, just go again to our resource center and you can just search on transportation scalable successes, you'll find that story. We're already at number four, Meredith. What's our fourth story that you may have missed?

Meredith Trimble: Okay. This is flying by, but number four is, how one county modernized in the cloud. This is a story about New Castle County, Delaware. And this is one so many local governments can relate to. This county was operating with 20 year old technology that created an environment of, this will sound familiar to people, cumbersome, manual processes and offline spreadsheets. Their legacy financial system was behind by several versions. It was minimally supported and they were dealing with a failing server that really was a major risk to the county's data and operations. So with an administration that supported tech advancement, the county established an enterprise transformation plan to really modernize its infrastructure and to fortify cybersecurity, and to replace all of those legacy systems with cloud solutions. I love this story because they jumped into that with very specific goals in mind, including to create intuitive user centered workflows and to provide self-service capabilities for all of their different types of customers out there in the community, and also to enhance transparency and dashboard reporting for both those internal and external stakeholders.

Meredith Trimble: So the solution that the story talks about was specifically a new cloud based ERP system that gave the county just to name a few benefits, a completely redesigned chart of accounts, fully integrated purchasing and flexible budgeting. All of those are just such good things that local government, especially local government finance professionals all across the country can really identify with. And to everyone's great relief, I'm sure, offline spreadsheets were replaced with realtime reports and staff moved to paperless workflows, which has been something that has dramatically increased productivity for county staff. I should also note that moving to this cloud ERP solution gave New Castle County, Delaware cost savings, which right now is also a very good thing. I think it's good for people to remember that from just a purely technology perspective, cloud solutions do things like eliminate hardware costs and ongoing maintenance and operations costs. And the county realized savings in those areas. They also realized savings with asset reporting that was previously outsourced for up to a hundred thousand dollars a year. And now they can do that on their own in house.

Jeff Harrell: I'm glad you brought this example to us, Meredith, because I think a lot of times everyone feels like you hear a lot about the cloud and I think everyone understands why you should move to the cloud. And you called out a lot of the benefits of the cloud. But a lot of times you don't know how.

Meredith Trimble: Right.

Data Equity and Policing

Jeff Harrell: And it feels like a giant leap. You're, "Where we are today with these manual processes and I see the clouds benefits, but how do I get there?" And to hear about a county who went through it and works through the process, I think is very helpful. All right. Well, that leads us, believe it or not, we are already at number five of our five things or five stories you may have missed.

Meredith Trimble: All right, everybody has missed the story so far, everybody, because it's going live today, the exact same day this podcast will air. This story is called, data equity and policing. The context here is that police encounters that result in arrests can have a significant impact on a person's employment or wealth or any other socioeconomic factor. And while that's known and reported nationally, the focus is now beginning to shift to local analysis around how to solve some of these issues. And the story is about Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's a really fantastic example of using data to inform police equity efforts. Again, this is so relevant today because all local governments increasingly want to know the details of law enforcement activities in their communities. And they want to know this to ensure equity and public safety for all residents. And I hate to give too much away here because I do really want people to read this story, but unpacking racial disparities in policing requires drawing insights and understanding from data. And what that does is that insight or data supports internal reforms and it strengthens community ties. And it does both of those in really problem solving ways. In terms of a few specifics, the ongoing effort in Chattanooga combines public safety data with all different things like census demographics, neighborhood based planning, and even the local budget to provide decision makers with a comprehensive view of the entire local public safety landscape. And resulting analysis from that view aims to illuminate patterns or unearthed policies and tactics to adjust when needed.

Meredith Trimble: And so by that, I really mean what a leader could say is, could social services maybe respond to specific types of non-emergency calls rather than the police? And the key with Chattanooga's efforts is the city's enterprise data platform is what centralizes and organizes and helps analyze all of this public safety data. Each Monday morning, the mayor Andy Berke meets with the police chief and they review this data dashboard, and together they identify areas for improvement and they iterate on what's going well. And so in practical terms, this dashboard supports the police department in addressing how economic based citations, for example, may impact the community. And it sheds light on potential partnerships that may not currently exist, but maybe partnerships that the police department can form to help solve some of these issues. And this data is not just kept to internal decision makers, this data is in Chattanooga guiding really important conversations with local pastors and public defenders and neighborhood residents themselves.

Jeff Harrell: Well, we warned listeners at the beginning that there's a lot of fresh content. This is a very recent story, so recent that it actually drops today. And I love this story. We also talked a little bit about the evergreen content that you can find on the resource center. And so Meredith, I think our bonus, we always like to give a bonus on the podcast, our bonus story that you may have missed is a little bit more of an evergreen piece, is that right?

Meredith Trimble: Yes. So I love a bonus just like you do. And I have one ready today. And I think the message from Tyler's president and CEO, Lynn Moore called, transformation for the road ahead is a really good one for people to read now. That was actually our very first blog of 2021. And heading into a new year, it's just a really good time to reflect and look at where we thought we were going in 2021. The year held so many challenges for the public sector, but with new funding sources and a newly engaged public, the year also offered a truly unique environment that was ripe for a little change and a little transformation that was honestly probably a bit overdue. So things like a cloud first strategy, enhanced civic engagement, really leveraging data and insights, enabling connected communities, those were the types of things that this story talked about. And those were the things that we set out to do with our clients this year. And I think it's really good timing for leaders to take stock of all of this promise and to see where their jurisdictions have met the moment and maybe to reflect on these areas of opportunity heading into 2022.

Jeff Harrell: It's interesting to think back on when you wrote this blog, Meredith. This is the beginning of 2021, which was not even quite a year into the pandemic. And to read it and look at kind of the forward thinking nature of the blog and some of the things that we would be looking at here in 2021 is really, really interesting, and a good reflection too. So thanks for bringing that one as well.

Meredith Trimble: And I think it's still a really valid roadmap. We still have challenges. We still have disruptions that can be leveraged for good. We still have federal funding dollars that can be put to use in different ways, and we still have an engaged, interested citizenry. So all of the things that held such promise still exist. And I think there's still just a ton of opportunity for government leaders at all levels.

Jeff Harrell: Well, as I mentioned, I will put links into these show notes for each of these different stories. But that last one you can find by searching for transformation for the road ahead, a blog from our CEO here at Tyler Technologies, Lynn Moore. Well, Meredith, this has been awesome. I think you curated an awesome list for us. And it's just a kind of amazing to think back on 2021, as we now kind of enter the last couple of months of the year and all that's gone on and what a big year it has been.

Meredith Trimble: Yep. It has. The circumstances of 2021 really created an environment for so much creativity and innovation and acceleration of some plans, and all of that converged and it resulted in just a bank of hundreds of really great stories.

Jeff Harrell: Well, Meredith, this has been great. And thank you for grabbing these stories and reminding us of some of the really interesting things that happen in 2021. But we would love for listeners to not to miss them going forward [inaudible 00:28:08]. So what's the best way for them to make sure they stay in the loop on the latest of all the great content that you're creating?

Meredith Trimble: On Tylertech.com/resources. If people are interested in blog articles, clicking on any one of those articles, they can filter out, as we said at the outset, by areas of interest to them. There is a can't miss box that says subscribe. All you have to do is enter your email and you'll be able to get all of the latest Tyler content and even select areas of content that most interest you. So you'll be able to sign up for newsletters and then get webinars, blog updates, videos, and more right to your inbox every month.

Jeff Harrell: Well, that's awesome. And thanks again, Meredith for joining us and we're excited to see what 20, gosh, can you believe it, we're starting to plan into 2022.

Meredith Trimble: I cannot believe it.

Jeff Harrell: What 2022 will bring us. So thanks for joining us.

Meredith Trimble: Thank you.

Jeff Harrell: Well, as I mentioned in the episode, I have attached and linked all of these great stories into the show notes. But again, you can find them by going to Tylertech.com. At the top of the page, click on resources, it'll take you to the resource center. You can filter on a variety of different things. You can keyword search, and you can find exactly the kind of content that you're looking for there on the resource center. Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. I had a lot of fun looking back at some of the great stories that we told in 2021. 2022 is on its way. We know there will be great stories to tell for 2022 as well. And thank you for listening to this podcast. We drop a brand new episode every other Monday. So please subscribe. We've got big plans for the podcast throughout the rest of this year and on into 2022 as well. Well, thanks for joining me. My name is Jeff Harrell. I'm the director of content marketing for Tyler Technologies. And we'll talk to you soon.